Should parents be charged for their child's crimes?

With juvenile offenders responsible for more and more repeat and violent crimes, victims are demanding that negligent parents be held accountable.

The idea of holding parents responsible or somewhat responsible for the illegal behaviors of their children is a time-honored or time-dishonored and controversial phenomenon.

According to Victoria E. M. Cain in Time magazine’s Made By History , Colorado in 1903 passed the first “punish the parents” law, reflecting the feeling of many that the parents of children who spend most of their formative years at home are obliged to keep their progeny away from law-breaking.

By the mid-20th century, there was an apparent consensus that there were no more intuitively stronger links than parents and their children via time spent together and inter